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Generation game: powering the future

Demand for electricity is growing twice as fast as the world’s population. Can science help to bridge the energy gap?

Eureka

November 2 2011, 9:00pm, The Times

SPL

Sometime on Hallowe’en the planet’s population sailed past seven billion, en route for eight billion by the mid-2020s. As it did, global demand for electrical power alone was rising roughly twice as fast, presenting the world’s engineers with a problem they may simply be unable to solve.

Consider: close to three billion of us live in India or China, where per capita energy consumption is still a fraction of the level of advanced economies. It cannot stay that way unless we un-invent personal mobility, the iPad and the Chinese winter.

Consider also: even if you choose to ignore the environmental impact of mining oil from tar sands or fracking gas from shale — not to mention the bulk of climate-change science — you must eventually acknowledge that…